


After You

by malfoire



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s03e06 Dolce, Happy Ending, M/M, Missing Scene, Murder Husbands, less stabbing more kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 05:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16758853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfoire/pseuds/malfoire
Summary: Will has a plan. He will wait for the grin on his abdomen to seal, he will set sail for Europe, and he will follow Hannibal into catacombs, Lithuanian estates, art galleries; wherever. It’s Hannibal, so Will knows they will be somewhere beautiful when he kills him.





	After You

**Author's Note:**

> can these two men stop trying to kill each other for 0.218 seconds and give us the reconciliatory kiss scene we all want and deserve
> 
> (evidently, no, so i took matters into my own hands)

Will has a plan. He will wait for the grin on his abdomen to seal, he will set sail for Europe, and he will follow Hannibal into catacombs, Lithuanian estates, art galleries; wherever. It’s Hannibal, so Will knows they will be somewhere beautiful when he kills him.

He makes this plan very quietly, in his head, between morphine doses and visitors. (There are more of the former than the latter.) He tells only Abigail, who sits at his bedside, her neatly combed locks shimmering like a mirage beneath the hospital lights. The blue of her gaze steadies him, roots him - ironically - a little closer to reality, and away from the incessant noise of his imagination.

She tilts her head one way. “Is that your revenge?”

“It’s my apology.”

She tilts her head the other way. “To Hannibal?”

“To you.”

Abigail stares, long and hard, and skeptical. She says what Will knows.

“I don’t want that.” Her voice softens. Tears well up in her eyes. “He made a place for me. You took it away.”

“Yes,” Will says. In the eye of his broken mind, the tears run like knives down his own face, cutting deeper and deeper until something dark emerges from the marrow. Until his face is a gash of grins, blood seeping between the teeth.

He understands, then, it’s not Hannibal he’s going to kill, not the pulse of his future he’ll steal. It’s going to be his own, too. Whatever gruesome, inglorious hole in the world Hannibal had carved out, and Will had destroyed - the last flicker of that future is what Will must murder, and cleanly dispose of.

“Yes,” Will says again. “It’s my repentance.”

If you can’t stop falling into graves, bury the gravedigger.

-

He doesn’t know how he’ll do it, just yet. So much will depend on circumstance.

But Will knows he won’t make a show of it. No arrangement of corpses into paintings, no puncture wounds from stag antlers, nothing strung up like angels or poised on a field. He won’t stop to excavate motifs from Hannibal’s body, or imbue his own meaning into the corpse. He certainly won’t keep any souvenirs. Or eat them.

Anything Will could do with Hannibal’s body, has already been done to his own. Bloodied, scarred, shattered and mended, the parts healing in wrong places. Kissed and choked, clawed at. Pinned down and fucked with vicious tenderness, and later, the hurt of silent betrayal. Caressed, afterwards, always. Revived.

For Hannibal, Will wants nothing at all. If he could just push him off a sea cliff, and never see him crawl back up, that would be fine.

He doesn’t even need to hear the water.

-

Chilton is leaving flowers at his bedside. Abigail is flickering in and out of his consciousness, losing battery.

“I know what’s coming for you, Will.” Jack is handing him the letter in the pew. “You don’t have to die on me, too.”

(Will traces the word _sorry_ in Hannibal’s handwriting a few times.)

Alana is wheeling herself back into darkness, calling Hannibal’s friendship a _blackmail raised to the level of love_ , steel-gazed and seething. Already, fury has made her into a foreign form. She won’t mend right.

Will settles a hand to his stomach, the thin, puckered lip of that smiling mouth. Nobody ever does, after Hannibal.

His gaze flits to the dining table, just a little past the kitchen. They fucked once, there. Heady with touch, obsessed to have found each other’s nightmares and fantasies singing in the other’s brain. _A playmate._ High off of visions of a conjoined future.

“I want to build you a house,” Hannibal said to him, nonsensically.

“Okay.” Will had kissed his jaw, let himself be pushed onto the table and eaten alive. “Put me in your palace.”

The memory flickers out. Hannibal’s kitchen is empty. Blood ghosts wring themselves out on the clean wood tiles. It takes Will several moments to regain his composure - he feels like a fresh wound.

The boat’s almost ready.

-

Hannibal leaves his heart for Will to find on a holy altar, mangled and horrifically elegant. After they remove the corpse, Will lies down in its place and tilts his head up to study the mosaic. He feels small, more alone than ever.

Hannibal has always made him feel small. Before, it was pleasant - all those nights in his office, his monstrous bed, where he’d crawl to his side on sore, trembling limbs. _Come here. Stay with me._ Will would press so close he could have melded into Hannibal’s body, disappeared entirely into the cool expanse of his chest. _Where else would I go?_

He imagines crawling into Hannibal’s heart, tucking himself against the wall of an atrium. Every pumping beat like notes to a song.

“Maybe that’s how I should do it,” he whispers. “Plunge a hand into his chest.”

“You’ll never wash off the blood,” Abigail says. “Better do it with distance. A bullet.”

“Not intimate,” Will observes.

“Get too close,” Abigail says, and suddenly she sounds like Alana, “and you’ll be the one with teeth marks on your heart.”

-

He’ll do it with a knife.

He hasn’t decided this yet when he sees Hannibal drawing, back turned, accompanied by nothing and nobody except the _scritch-scratch_ of pencil on paper. His eyes flick up every few moments to see the painting. It is an extremely human moment, oddly private. That even a creature like Hannibal must look up for inspiration, to commit something to memory.

He stills at Will’s footsteps. Watches him with the gaze of a man found, drawing forgotten as Will comes to sit beside him with a soft grunt. If he were a decade younger, he could shake getting pushed off a train a little faster.

There are shards of glass sparkling in Hannibal’s eyes. Some may have fallen out and scratched him; he looks as cut up as Will is. Pride and joy are bleeding out of him.

Will is bleeding, too, the moment he turns his gaze toward him. Every wound is resurfacing on his skin, snarling open, stitches torn out. It’s a cathartic excruciation.

He expects the pain. He even expects the rush of love that follows it, tidal and feverish.

He doesn’t, perhaps, adequately account for the _longing_. The way it guts him open all over again. The way it makes him want to gut _Hannibal_ like that, if only to crawl inside. To inhabit his body just as Hannibal has inhabited his: cut him open on the kitchen floor and left a shard of himself inside for the doctors sew shut.

Then he decides, finally, how he’s going to do it. The blade in his pocket hums.

But first, Will touches him, because he’ll go mad otherwise. Hannibal leans into the hand he presses against his cheek, nearly trance-like.

“I wanted to know you before I laid eyes on you again,” Will whispers.

“Do you?” Hannibal studies him, as if looking from far away.

“I know myself.” Will swallows, choosing his words carefully. “And I know my future.”

He won’t lie to Hannibal again. Neither of them will survive that gutting.

Hannibal begins to speak, and he should do it now, do it fast. Do it right, how he could have done it the first time. (No bandaged hands. No making homes out of bodies, dead or alive. No dinners. No nights. No morning afters.)

“If I saw you everyday, forever, Will,” Hannibal murmurs in reverent tones. “I would remember this time.”

(No phone call. No broken resolve the moment he hears Hannibal speak across the line.)

“Don’t be dramatic,” Will says, laughing, suddenly panicked.

“You’re the shape of my future,” Hannibal breathes. It’s the way he says it. It's the way Hannibal kisses him _after_ he says it.

It punches Will. Hollows him out. 

Hannibal isn’t lying, either.

They part with ragged breaths, worn out from handling each other so gently. Will had come to kill - but something is shuddering back to life between them. Hannibal moves away after what feels like an eternity.

“I knew you would find us, you always do.” He closes the sketchbook.

“Us?”

“You and I.” There’s peace in the lines of his back when he stands. The look of a man resurrected in his eyes when he regards Will. “Shall we?”

“After you,” Will says, watching him turn.

Now. _Now._

But the thought is already dying in the chambers of his mind, echoing off crumbling walls.

Will follows, after him.

-

(There will always be a cadence of inevitability to Hannibal. Lurched back into his orbit, Will sees it now. He sank his teeth into Will a long time ago, tore off his skin to lick and nourish the thing underneath. Tamed it. Taught it to adore him and heel for him.

Or, maybe Will did that all by himself. He’d watched a monster undress before him and chose to unbutton his own person suit to stand a little closer; only to fall in love with the Devil’s nakedness, his likeness to man. And now it’ll wound the both of them too much to detach.

So there will be no ghosts. What he and Hannibal destroyed will come together in a new form. Will will repent in the red waters of Hannibal’s sea, carrying him out to a future he knew, somehow, would always arrive.)

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr at [malfoire](http://malfoire.tumblr.com/), come say hello!


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